Judge: No Privacy Expectations For Data On P2P Networks

Posted by Soulskill on Tuesday November 12, 2013 @07:23AM from the enjoy-your-prison-term dept.

An anonymous reader writes "A federal judge in Vermont has denied a motion to suppress evidence filed by three defendants in a child porn case. The three had alleged their Fourth Amendment rights were violated when police used an automated P2P query-response tool to gather information from their computers. That information subsequently led to their arrest and indictments. The judge held (PDF) that the defendants had either inadvertently, or otherwise, made the information available for public download on a P2P network and therefore couldn't assert any privacy claims over the data."

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In other news... by sirwired · 2013-11-12 08:06 · Score: 5, Interesting

In other news, the Police also do not need a warrant to attend your public meeting. They don't need a warrant to read the book you published on the rack of the local bookstore. They don't need a warrant to browse around your open store in the local strip mall.
And they don't need a warrant to download data you offered up to any member of the public and browse through it to find incriminating evidence.